Living Anarchism. José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement by Chris Ealham, AK Press

Living Anarchism. José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement by Chris Ealham, AK Press In August 1989, José Peirats — anarchist militant, brickmaker, baker, propagandist and chronicler of the anarcho- syndicalist CNT labour unions — ended his intensely lived span of eighty-one years by walking into the sea at Burriana beach. A multitude of deteriorating health issues including Parkinson’s disease meant he could no longer face life— or death — with dignity. As his biographer, Chris Ealham, observes: “As a lifelong activist, existence had little meaning without action — this had been the principle that guided him in his struggle for a better Spain.” Ealham’s engrossing account of the Peirats story, however, is not simply the odyssey of one union militant’s noble life of selfless struggle against uneven odds; it is a riveting, albeit distinctly uncomfortable, complex, warts-and-all portrait of shameful treachery ending in the ignominious morphing of a once-dynamic libertarian working-class organisation into the monolithic monstrosity that was, from 1945 forward, the Toulouse-based MLE-CNT (Movimiento Libertario Español-CNT-in-exile). Living Anarchism: José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement is a salutary ‘warning from history’ — and is essential reading for all libertarians and historians of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism. José Peirats was born in 1908 in the Valencian village of La Vall d’Uixó, the second child of Teresa Valls Rubert and José Peirats Dupla, ‘alpargateros’ who earned their living making canvas and jute rope soled espadrilles — or ‘alpargatas’. Teresa, his mother, was the driving force in the family, and it was her dissatisfaction with rural life that led to the family moving to Barcelona’s Poble Sec district with its substantial Valencian population. Here, in 1916, at the age of eight, Peirats left primary school to begin his working life in a succession of short-lived dead-end jobs. Teresa, anxious to ensure her son’s ongoing education, enrolled José in the nearby Workers’ Rationalist Athenaeum, a night school inspired by the non-hierarchical educational principles of the recently executed anarchist teacher Francisco Ferrer y Guardia. Unfortunately, the young Peirats’s time here was cut short by the vicious anti-working class repression unleashed following the Catalan general strike of August 1917. This resulted in the outlawing of the CNT unions and the closure of their meeting halls and the associated free schools and athenaeums, which were seen by the authorities as the seedbeds of revolution. Young José found a job as brickmaker, but a congenital hip cartilage problem (Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease) that caused him to limp slightly impeded his mobility (it became more pronounced in his twenties) in the dangerous environment of the brickworks so at the age of ten he moved on to work in a glass factory. However, in the tumultuous industrial unrest of the time, that job didn’t last long either. Laid off after an unsuccessful glassworkers’ strike, José returned to brick making, the trade from which he was to earn his livelihood, mostly, for the next twenty years. It was in 1922 that José, a fourteen-year old time-served apprentice, joined Barcelona CNT’s Brickmakers’ Society (la Sociedad de Ladrilleros), part of the CNT’s militant Construction Union. This coincided with the long-drawn-out brickmakers’ strike of 1923, which lasted from February through to September that year, a strike that finally collapsed with the military coup of General Primo de Rivera. The experience was a rite of passage for Peirats, marking his radical coming-of-age and turning him into ‘un obrero consciente’, a class-conscious worker. Embarrassed by his lack of education and culture, the teenage Peirats, under the tutelage of his socialist uncle Benjamin, and Juan Roigé, his former teacher at the Sants Rationalist School, began to read seriously and extensively and, supported by the latter, he went back to evening classes. In 1928, with the threat of military service lifted on medical grounds, Peirats focused his attention on helping to reorganise the still-clandestine CNT and launching a publication entitled El Boletín del Ladrillero [Brickmakers’ Bulletin]. Its purpose was, he stated, ‘to instil our members with a social culture. We had swotted up on literature and sociology during the eight-years’ peace of the dictatorship. We hadn’t wasted any time.’ Peirats was now a dedicated class-struggle anarchist, deeply involved with the CNT defence groups and with a healthy distrust of middle-class anarchist intellectuals. He took a particular dislike — understandably — to anarchist publisher Juan Montseny (Federico Urales) and his even more overbearing daughter Federica. The collapse of Primo de Rivera’s military dictatorship in January 1930 marked for Peirats the beginning of what he later described as an ‘infernal decade of action’. As well as his commitment to the anarchist affinity (friendship) group, ‘Verdad’ [Truth] the escalating activities of the still-clandestine CNT took up most of his time, activities that culminated on 14 April 1931 in the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic. Not only a ‘man of action’, the twenty-three- year-old Peirats found himself thrust into the role of public speaker and industrial organiser. Complicating his life even further was the collapse of another brickmakers’ strike and a deterioration in his hip condition, which meant having to change his trade yet again — to that of baker. The early 1930s in Spain was a time of deep divisions within the extended CNT family of anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists and unionists of other persuasions. It was the perennial struggle between revolutionaries and reformists. The latter were the so-called ‘treintistas’, thirty prominent CNT ‘moderates’ who were signatories to a provocative and divisive anti-insurrectionary and anti-anarchist manifesto. As Peirats himself acknowledged — who usually steered a middle course in these matters — there were ‘demagogues’ on all sides, including his own. The first CNT-led revolutionary insurrection took place in 1932 at Alt Llobregat, a mining district in northern Catalonia. This was followed in January 1933 by a more widespread rising, and another in December of that same year. None of these directly involved Peirats who, although sympathetic to the ‘maximalist’ position of the abolition of the state and the direct and immediate mass sequestration of industry by the workers themselves, and far from being a pacifist, was critical of what he called the ‘insurrectionary adventurism’ and ‘unaccountable vanguardism of elitist groups acting without democratic mandate from grassroots assemblies’. He was equally opposed —on ethical, strategic and psychological grounds — to armed robberies, the so-called ‘expropriations’ popular with the action and defence groups who saw it as a means of topping up the unions’ coffers and supporting its prisoners and their families. As Peirats saw it, these actions had a tendency to shift from being a means to an end, to ends in themselves, leading to corruption and criminality with the participants ending up marginalised and compromised — and keeping much of the proceeds of their criminal acts to fund their precarious clandestine lifestyles. His principled opposition to what he constantly denounced as ‘banditry’ brought him into direct conflict with many of the FAI affinity — and CNT defence groups. (Later, after 1945, as secretary of the MLE-CNT-in-exile, this predilection for ‘illegalism’ among some sectors of the movement — i.e., those involved in the clandestine anti-Francoist guerrilla movement — caused him considerable complications within the organisation and led to him being compromised, arrested, tortured and jailed.) After the revolution of July 1936, the twenty-eight-year old Peirats — who had taken part in the initial storming of Barcelona’s Pedralbes barracks on 19 July —became a thorn in the flesh of the key players in the newly co-opted higher committees of the Catalan CNT-FAI. Under pressure from astute and wily politicians such as Catalan President Lluis Companys and terrified of ‘going for broke’ (the abolition of the state; most of industry was now under workers’ control) they abandoned whatever anarchist principles they paid lip service to in order to throw in their lot, unnecessarily, with their far more canny political enemies, first in the Militias Committee, then in the Generalitat — the Catalan parliament — and finally in the Madrid governments. I’m referring here, particularly, to Federica Montseny, her partner Germinal Esgleas, García Oliver, the weak-willed and incompetent CNT secretary-general Mariano Rodriguez Vazquez, and Pedro Herrera and Diego Abad de Santillán of the FAI, the Iberian Anarchist Federation. Fidel Miró, of the Libertarian Youth (Juventudes Libertarias), described Peirats at the time as the ‘leader’ of the ‘redskins’, as those opposed to government collaboration were known. Perhaps to distance himself from the stultifying orbit of the self-appointed pro-governmental cabal — who, under the pretext of war and with most of the more able militants at the front, had seized control of the higher committees of the Catalan CNT — Peirats accepted an invitation from the secretary of the Lleida CNT Defence Committee and the FAI-affiliated local federation of anarchist groups to move to Lleida and take over as editor of the local anarchist daily, Acracia, a newspaper that he soon turned into one of the foremost critics of the Catalan CNT-FAI leadership. Peirats had been building his journalistic experience since 1928 when he first began writing for the anarchist press. Since 1934 — while still working fulltime as a brickmaker — he had been on the editorial board of Solidaridad Obrera, the Catalan anarcho-syndicalist daily. The leaders of the Catalan CNT-FAI took their revenge on Acracia with all the administrative, economic and bureaucratic powers at their disposal. It was a campaign of intimidation and suppression that peaked in the aftermath of the Events of May 1937; only then was the CNT-FAI leadership able to isolate its critics and reassert its control over its rebellious rank-and-file.

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